AIA 2007: San Antonio

Wow. What a fun first day at the AIA National Convention. So many of our customers came to the booth today to see our new version of ArchiOffice and provide plenty of great new ideas. Just as exciting was the enthusiasm for the software they projected to the newbies who were visiting out booth for the first time. I felt a little embarrassed on some occasions when our customers were offering up their exaltations. Trust me – we didn’t pay anyone to hang outside our booth, like groupies.

Furthermore, it is so fulfilling to see our customers – people we regularly speak with on the phone or on the web forums, who stopped by the booth just to say thanks. Thank-you right back ArchiOffice family. As I hope you can see by what we’ve got going on at the booth – we really are family – and we’re looking out for you. Keep those ideas coming – and we’ll keep working to make sure your Architectural firm is as profitable as it can be – and your team is having as much fun practicing Architecture as you always hoped.

For those of you who missed our May Newsletter, please check it out (click the red text link). The big treat here is our Technical Tip of the month which addresses a concern so many firms have with regard to how they should handle Consultants in ArchiOffice. In fact – two separate people asked me today what I thought was the best way to do this. My own personal advice – DO NOT do option 3 of this tip.

I’ll try and get a photo of our booth tomorrow (with my camera phone), so you can see what we’ve done this year to keep our booth as “green” as possible.

2 Comments

Elisabeth,My problem with option 3 (making the consultant an employee), is that they appear on reports and drop down lists that are really intended for employees only. How annoying it must be to see a consultant’s name in a list that is really intended for the office staff. However, if you do this – I might suggest making the consultant(employee), be marked as "Overhead" in the User Setup Preferences – just below the Cost Rate field.

As far as the budget goes – if you use option #2 (Non reimbursable Expense – also know as an indirect expense), you will still be able to build the cost of the consultant in your budget. I wouldn’t worry about the hours – since you really have no control over the hours your consultants work anyway.However, if you look in the Project>Billing>Summary layout – the "Actual Time Slips" fields (in yellow), do in fact show any Expense slips that are Non-Reimbursable. So while hours might be off – the actual costs of the phase are correct.

Bottom line – Hours in the budget are better formed in the Project>Checklist area. In the Project>Billing area – it’s usually typical to put in the same number of hours that are shown in the Checklists for each phase.

Hi! Thank your for a very good explanation on subcontractors in the newsletter. But you make me curious. Why not option 3 regarding subcontractors? That was the one I settled on in one of our projects. We often have project in which we do the invoicing for all the subcontractors. When I log a budget for these projects, I find it useful to see the whole sum to be invoiced, in order for both us and the customer to see where in the process we are with the invoicing. That means I have to include all hrs, both ours and subcontractors. If I were to use opt 2, the only place I can get accurate information about the cost vs income is on the charts. Expences don’t show in the summary view as far as I can understand. I would have to exclude the subcontractor hrs from the budget, and the big picture would not be excisting at all. Or am I overlooking something? I am a new customer, so it might be that there are tricks I don’t know yet.